Praying for Sleep (24 page)

Losing hope, Owen moved aimlessly through the grass, pausing to listen for footsteps, and hearing only owls or distant truck horns or the eerie white noise of an expansive autumn night. After ten minutes of meandering he noticed a glint coming from a line of trees west of him. He headed instinctively toward it. At the grove of maples he went into a crouch and moved slowly through a cluster of saplings until he came to a break in the foliage. With his gun he pushed aside a bough of dew-soaked hemlock, inhaling in surprise as drops of water fell with chill pinpricks on his neck and face.

Walking in slow circles around the old MG, Owen studied the ground. He kicked aside a white animal skull. He recognized it instantly as a ferret's. There were dozens of footprints and tire prints covering the asphalt and the shoulder. Some seemed to be Hrubek's but they were largely obliterated by people who had been here after him. He saw dogprints too and wondered momentarily if the trackers had learned that Hrubek was going west. But there was evidence of only one animal, not the three that he'd seen pursuing Hrubek from the site of his escape.

He circled the car again, weaving over the shoulder and through the bushes nearby. No sign of Hrubek's prints in any direction. Hands on hips, he glanced at the car once more. This time he noticed the bike rack but then he immediately dismissed the idea that Hrubek had stolen a cycle. What kind of escapee, he reasoned, would make a getaway on a bike, riding down open highways?

But wait... Michael Hrubek was a man whose madness had its own logic. A bicycle? Why not? Owen examined the road around the car and found faint tread marks, rather wide ones-either balloon tires or those of a bike ridden by a heavy cyclist. He glanced back at the car. The carrier rack seemed broken as if the bike had been removed by sheer force.

Owen continued to follow the tread marks. At the intersection of this country lane and Route 236 he found where the rider had paused, perhaps debating which way to go.

He was not surprised to find, beside the tread, the clear imprint of Hrubek's boot.

Nor was he surprised to find that the rider had decided to turn west.

15

The house was little more than a shotgun cabin at the end of a dirt-and-rock road winding through this scruffy forest. The BMW squealed to a stop in a rectangle of mud amid discarded auto parts, sheet metal, termite-chewed firewood and oil drums torch-cut as if someone had intended to make a business of manufacturing barbecues but gave up after running out of acetylene, or desire.

Richard Kohler climbed out of the car and walked to the cabin. Rubbing his deep-set red eyes with a scrawny knuckle, he knocked on the screen door. No answer, though he heard the tinny, cluttered sound of a TV from inside. He rapped again, louder.

When the door opened he smelled liquor before he smelled wood smoke, and there was a lot of wood smoke to smell.

"Hello, Stuart."

After a long pause the man responded, "Didn't expect to see you. Guess I might've. Raining yet? It's supposed to be a son-of-a-bitch storm."

"You mind if I come in for a few minutes?"

"My girlfriend, she's out tonight." Stuart Lowe didn't move from the doorway.

"It won't take long."

"Well."

Kohler stepped past the orderly and into the small living room.

The couch was draped with two blankets and had the appearance of a sickbed. It was an odd piece of furniture bamboo frame, cushions printed with orange and brown and yellow blotches. It reminded Kohler poignantly of Tahiti, where he'd gone on his honeymoon. And where he'd gone after his divorce, which had occurred thirty-three months later. Those two weeks represented his only vacations in the last seven years.

Kohler chose a high-backed chair to sit in. The orderly, no longer in his regulation blue jumpsuit, was now wearing jeans and a T-shirt and white socks without shoes. His arms were covered with bandages, his left eye was blackened, and his forehead and cheeks were flecked with small puncture wounds brown-stained from Betadine. He now sat back on the couch and glanced at the blankets as if he were surprised to find the bedclothes sitting out.

On the TV Jackie Gleason was screaming in a shrill and thoroughly unpleasant way at Audrey Meadows. Lowe muted the program. "They snag him yet?" Lowe asked, glancing at the phone, by which he presumably would already have learned if they'd snagged him.

Kohler told him no.

Lowe nodded and laughed vacantly at Jackie Gleason shaking his fist.

"I want to ask you a few things about what happened," Kohler asked conversationally.

"Not much to tell."

"Still."

"How'd you hear about it? Adler wanted it kept quiet."

"I've got my spies," Kohler said, and did not smile. "What happened?"

"Uh-hum. Well, we seen him and we run after him. But it was pretty dark. It was damn dark. He must've knowed the lay of the land pretty good and he jumped over this ravine but we fell into it."

Lowe closed his mouth and once more examined the screen, on which an automobile commercial now played. "Look at all that writing on there. Giving all that financing crap. Who can read that in three seconds? That's stupid, they do that."

The room wasn't shabby so much as dim. The prints on the walls weren't bad seascapes but they were dusky. The carpet was gray, as were the blankets that Lowe was pretending he hadn't been wrapped in five minutes before.

"How you feeling?"

"Nothing broke. Sore, but not like Frank. He took the worst of it."

"What'd Adler say to you?"

Lowe found some serviceable words and submitted them. Nothing much. Wanted to know how Lowe was feeling. Where Hrubek seemed to be going. "Truth be told, he wasn't real happy we dropped the ball in the first place and he got loose."

Across the bottom of the TV screen ran a banner announcing that a tornado had touched down in Morristown, killing two people. The National Weather Service, the streaming type reported, had extended the tornado and flash-flood warnings until 3:00 a.m. Both men stared at these words intently and both men forget them almost as soon as the bulletin ended.

"When you found him tonight, did Michael say anything?"

"Can't hardly recall. I think something about us wearing clothes and him not. Maybe something else. I don't know. I was never so scared in my life."

Kohler said, "Frank Jessup was telling me about Michael's meds."

"Frank knows about that? I didn't think he did. Wait, maybe I mentioned it to him."

The doctor nodded at the screen. "Art Carney's my favorite."

"He's a funny one, sure is. I like Alice. She knows what she's about."

"Frank wasn't sure how long Michael'd been cheeking them. He said two days."

"Two?" Lowe shook his head. "Where'd he hear that? Try five."

"I think they want to keep it quiet."

Lowe began to relax. "That's what Adler told me. It's not my business. I mean, with..." The comfort vanished instantly and Kohler noticed Lowe's hand seeking the satin strip on the blanket beside him. "And I just spilled the beans, didn't I? Oh, fuck," he spat out, bitterly discouraged at how easily his mind had been picked.

"I had to know, Stu. I'm his doctor. It's my job to know."

"And it's my job, period. And I'm gonna lose it. Shit. Why'd you trick me?"

Kohler wasn't giving any thought to Lowe's employment. He felt his skin crackling with shock at this confirmation of his hunch. In his last session before the escape, yesterday, Michael Hrubek had looked Kohler in the eye and had lied about the Thorazine. He'd said he was taking all his meds and the dosage was working well. Three thousand milligrams. And the patient had given it up purposefully and lied about doing so after he'd been off the pills for five days. And he'd lied very well. Unlike psychopaths, schizophrenic patients are rarely duplicitous in such calculating ways.

"You've got to come clean, Stu. Hrubek's a time bomb. I don't think Adler understands that. Or if he does he doesn't much care." Kohler added soothingly, "You know Michael better than most of the doctors at Marsden. You've got to help me."

"I got to keep my job is what I've got to do. I'm making twenty-one thousand a year and spending twenty-two. Adler'll have my nuts for what I told you already."

"Ron Adler isn't God."

"I'm not saying anything else."

"Okay, Stuart, you gonna help me, or do I have to make some phone calls?"

"Fuck." A can of beer flew from the big hand into the gray wall and with a spray of foam fell gushing onto the dingy shag carpet. It was suddenly vitally important for Stuart Lowe to tend the embers of his fire. He leapt up and pitched three fresh logs onto the heap of the dying flames.

A gorgeous cascade of orange sparks bounced to the hearth. Lowe returned to the couch and said nothing for a moment. Kohler believed this meant that he accepted the terms of the agreement, which was of course no agreement at all. The signal of surrender was the soft pop as the TV was shut off.

"Did he stockpile all the Thorazine or flush it? You have any idea?"

"We found it. He stockpiled it."

"How much?"

Lowe said resignedly, "Five full days. Thirty-two hundred a day. This'll be the sixth."

"When you saw him tonight, was there any indication of what he had in mind?"

"He was just standing there in the buff, looking at us like he was surprised. But he wasn't surprised at all."

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing," Lowe spat out. "I don't mean a fucking thing."

"Tell me what he said. Exactly."

"Didn't Frank tell you? You already talked to him." He looked at Kohler bitterly to see if he had been as big a fool as he thought. The doctor had no choice but to oblige. "Frank's still recovering from surgery. He won't be conscious till morning."

"Jesus Christ."

"What did Michael say? Come on, Stu."

"Something about a death. He had a death to go to. I don't know. Maybe he meant a funeral or graveyard. I was pretty shook, you know. I was trying to fight him off Frank."

Kohler didn't respond and the orderly continued, "With those rubber things they give us."

"The truncheons?"

"I tried. I was trying to get him upside the head but he don't feel no pain. You know that."

"That's one thing about Michael," Kohler agreed, observing what a sorrowful liar Lowe was and feeling pity for this man, who'd obviously abandoned his partner to die a terrible death.

"That's all I heard. Then Michael grabbed away the club and come after me..."

"Now tell me what Adler really said to you."

Lowe exhaled air through puffed-out cheeks. He finally said, "I wasn't supposed to say nothing about the meds. To nobody. And he wanted to know if Michael 'd said anything about that lady in Ridgeton. He sent her a note or something."

"What lady?"

"Some broad at his trial, I don't know. Adler asked me if Michael'd ever mentioned her."

"Did he?"

"Not to me he didn't."

"What about this note?"

"I don't know nothing about it. Adler said to keep quiet about that too."

"When did he send it to her?"

"How the fuck should I know?"

"What's this woman's name?"

"You're going to ruin me, aren't you? I didn't get your patient back and you're going to fuck me over. Why don't you just admit it?"

"What's her name, Stu?"

"Liz something. Wait. Liz Atcheson, I think."

"Is there anything else you can tell me?"

"No," Lowe blurted so quickly all Kohler could do was fill the ensuing silence with his serene, unyielding gaze. The orderly finally said miserably, "Well, the wire."

"Wire?"

"I told Adler and Grimes and they made me swear I wouldn't say anything. Oh, Jesus... What a time I've had."

Kohler didn't move. His red, stinging eyes gazed at Lowe, who said sotto voce, as if Ronald Adler were making this a threesome, "We didn't fall."

"Tell me, Stu. Tell me."

"We could've jumped over that ravine easy. But Michael strung a trip wire for us. He knew we were coming. Strung a piece of fishline or bell wire and led us over it." Kohler was dumbfounded. "What are you saying?"

"What am I saying?" Lowe blurted furiously. "Aren't you listening? Aren't you listening"? I'm saying your patient may be off his brain candy and may be a schizo but he was fucking clever enough to lead us into a trap. And he damn near killed both of us." The orderly sealed his testimony by clicking the television back on and slouched into the couch, refusing to say anything more.

Passing over the Gunderson town line Trenton Heck braked deftly with his left foot as he skidded around a deer that stepped into the road and stopped to see what a collision with a one-ton pickup might do to her.

He eased back into the right lane and continued caroming down Route 236. He was driving like a teenager and he knew it, even taking the extreme measure of strapping a very unhappy Emil into the passenger seat with the blue canvas seatbelt, which the hound immediately began to chew through. Behind the truck swirled a wake of dust and bleached autumn leaves.

"Stop," Heck barked over the roar of the engine, knowing that "Don't chew," let alone "Leave that seatbelt be," would register in Emil's mind as mere human grunts, worth ignoring. The familiar command was pointless, however, and Heck let the matter go. "Good fellow," Heck said in a rare moment of sentiment, and reached over to scratch the big head, which slipped away in irritation.

"Damn," he muttered, "I'm doing it again." He realized that the hound's evasive maneuver reminded him of the way Jill had dodged away from his embrace the day after she'd served him with papers.

Got to stop thinking about that girl, he now ordered.

But of course he didn't.

"Mental cruelty and abandonment," Heck had read after the process server left. He hadn't even comprehended at first what these documents were. Abandonment? He thought they meant Jill herself was being sued for leaving the scene of an accident. She was a terrible driver. Then like a firecracker going off inside him he understood. Heck had been little good for anything for the month after that. It seemed that all he did was work with Emil and spend hours debating the separation with Jill — or rather with Jill's picture, since by then she'd moved out. Sitting on the bed where they'd romped so friskily he tried to recall her arguments. It seemed that he hadn't upheld his end of a vague bargain that had been made the morning following one particularly romantic, playful night. Their seventh date. At sunrise he'd found her plowing through his kitchen cabinets, looking for the Bisquick mix, and he'd interrupted the frenzied search to blurt a proposal. Jill had squealed and in her eagerness to hug him dropped a bag of flour. It detonated with a large white mushroom cloud. With happiness in her eyes and a little-girl pout on her lips, she cried, talking at curious length about the home that had been denied her all her life.